Spies kept tabs on Nobel winner Doris Lessing

Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing was under surveillance for more than 20 years during her youth by British spies who took a dim view of her Communist beliefs and anti-racist activism, declassified intelligence files have revealed.

Lessing first came to the attention of colonial-era intelligence agents in 1943 in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she grew up, and from then on spies kept tabs on her in Africa and Britain until 1964.